The only thing that it was at the beginning was a customs union. That it by now has become a supra-government of many nations, and that is was never a "haphazard venture" I don't dispute.
Do you agree with the description of the EU as "the project of unifying the countries of Europe in order to harness its collective economic power, and to avoid the bloody internecine strife that stains its history".?
The author concludes that by this yardstick it failed. Do you agree?
Matters of economic expansion or contraction matter little in that. As the author points out, the European fault lines are in decline of Christianity, demographic contraction and lack of unifying civic passion. That is determinative. The economics follow. The US looks marginally better, especially if the legacy of Obama is remedied soon.
No, I do not agree with that since it was a lie to begin with. Just another attempt to “unify” several nations under one overarching tyrannical central government as had happened so many times in the past going back a number of millennia. IOW, an empire. The “customs union” was clearly intended to grow into something different, especially by the words of the treaties, as I pointed out, “lay(ing) the foundation” for the aforementioned empire to rise up.
Under a social market economy, decline in Christian values is a given. The founders of the EU knew what they were doing, never mind patterning the EU’s government after the USSR’s government. The Schengen Agreement (1985) was the beginning of the EU’s deliberate attacks on demography as well.